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Presentation building applications lack good support to slide reuse. In this paper, we introduce SliDL, a digital library that facilitates slide reuse by flattening the presentation-based structure of current systems and providing slide retrieval facilities. The service-oriented architecture of SliDL enables slide sharing between different applications. We have developed clients for Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and OpenOffice.org Impress.

VOICE is a tool for cataloguing digital images using a voice-based user interface. The goal of VOICE is to ease the introduction of descriptive metadata associated to single images or collections of pictures, so that the data entered can be used later for keyword-based image retrieval. We have developed two versions of the tool, standalone VOICE and VOICE4Picasa. The latter is and add-in to Picasa which calls the former without need to switch from one application to the other one. In our demonstration, we will show the features of both systems, adding metadata to pictures and using Picasa's retrieval features to find images in our collections.

Citation analysis needs an in-depth transformation. Current systems have been long criticized due to defects such as lack of coverage and low accuracy of the citation data. Surprisingly, incorrect or incomplete data are used to make important decisions about researchers' careers. We argue that a new approach based on the collection of citation data when they are actually generated (that is, during the edition of papers) can overcome current limitations, and propose a new framework in which the research community as a whole is the owner as well as beneficiary of a Global Citation Registry characterized by high quality citation data. The registry will be accessible for all the interested parties and will be the source over which the different impact models can be applied.

In emergency response organizations with very limited resources, information technologies are not adequately explored. In such organizations, the simple adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on many other interrelated technologies. This work describes a model to help understanding these interrelationships. The model allows the cooperative evaluation of an organization through different perspectives. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the model, an organization can measure its maturity level and guide the investment in emergency response capabilities. The information technology dimension of the model has been applied to the firefight organization in Brazil.

This demo shows a set of tools for managing and performing document transformations. These tools share a common infrastructure consisting on a set of Web Services and programming libraries to define semantic mappings and generate the corresponding transformation template automatically. The framework is currently being used on the Bibshare project to support the conversion between metadata formats, as well as in other domains related to Digital Libraries and Software Engineering.

Interoperability has been one of the most challenging issues of last decade. Different solutions with various levels of sophistication have been proposed, such as wrappers, mediators, and other types of middleware. In most solutions, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been accepted as the de facto standard for the interchange of information due to its simplicity and flexibility.

Service Oriented Computing [1] is consolidating as the dominant paradigm for software development of this decade. The support it has received from researchers, practitioners and –most important –the software industry demonstrates the suitability of this approach. This means that current software systems must evolve in this direction in order to keep aligned with technology, providing a set of services that can be invoked by programs instead of end users.

Virtual Organizations (VO) consisting of heterogeneous institutions and individuals that share resources dynamically and in a coordinated way to support collaborative problem-solving are emerging in many fields. Consequently, new types of distributed infrastructures known as Grids have been proposed to cope with these new sharing requirements. Grids offer sets of collective services to support collaborative tasks which are distributed in nature and need asynchronous communication. Existing approaches to this problem lack of flexibility, adaptability and are tightly bound to the collective service that is provided. We present here a generic event model to build collective services that requires no programming, is extensible and can accommodate different event vocabularies. An implementation is also described using standard Web technologies like Java Servlets, XML, XSLT, and XSQL.

In this paper we deal with the problem of secure access to metadata information in Grid computing environments. The heterogeneity of the eventual data providers (with different local database management systems) and the enforcement of security policies for a vast number of potential data consumers are the two key problems to be solved. We present XSQL, a technology that solves the heterogeneity problem but lacks adequate security mechanisms for its use in grid like environments. As a consequence, we propose an advanced have security infrastructure with the necessary elements to be able to enforce complex policies based on identity and context information like roles and groups. The approach presented here results in authorization schemas that need no additional coding from data providers and, as a result, require little deployment efforts.

We describe an experiment carried out to compare the use of the Rational Unified Process and eXtreme Programming in the development of an information system, from a learning and training perspective. The experience was carried out with upper-level undergraduate students of the School of Computer Science at the Valencia University of Technology. We summarize the results obtained, from which some interesting conclusions can be obtained.

The advent of the Internet has led to dramatic changes in the cultural habits of citizens, the most remarkable of which is undoubtedly the democratization of the access to the culture. Focusing in the museum world, we foresee a new generation of information systems providing compatibility with the sensorial richness of existing in-place visits, augmentation of visits with virtual information so that artworks are better understood, dynamic content management, and ubiquity. In this paper we introduce the notion of Hybrid Museum as a virtual organization consisting of a physical museum where visitors are present, plus a distributed heterogeneous collection of sources of catalogued artwork, a middleware infrastructure to provide ubiquitous access to those sources and a wireless infrastructure so that disseminations may be available to visitors at any moment. We aim at building hybrid museums by integrating heterogeneous distributed sources that are managed and operated independently. We identify the different services hybrid museums must provide, and use the grid architectural model which has been successfully tested in other virtual organizations, to define their architectural features. Finally, we also describe MoMo, an implementation of a hybrid museum running on market-based handheld PCs to prove the feasibility of our ideas.